I was born in March of 1976 and, as such, didn’t watch any movies that year. The story goes I was taken to my first movie when I was a year old. Obviously this year was not a particular touch point for me in terms of specific experiences going to the movies. All of the movies from this year are ones I saw later in life, sometimes much later, and as such I feel a bit less of a connection to some of these than others that will appear later on this list. Nevertheless the five listed below all have a special place for me.

If you have not read the introduction to this exercise, I recommend you do so for context regarding what this all is. In short, be nice, these are my favorites based on how I encountered them in my life and what they mean for mean to me. This is not a list of objective best movies in their respective years and if a movie that you love or is considered great does not appear, it does not mean that I think it is shit or that I don’t love it. These are just my favorites for particular personal reasons. Feel free to let everyone know your favorite five for 1976 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 50-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!

1. Carrie-Brian DePalma

Brain DePalma’s Carrie is an adaptation of Stephen King’s first published novel of the same name. Featuring Sissy Spacek in the title role, Piper Laurie as her religious zealot mother, there are two different stories going on here that crash together in violence, blood, and psychokinesis. Carrie is a high school misfit, who would surely be home schooled nowadays, who doesn’t have any friends or real understanding of the world due to her mother’s overbearing zealotry, a belief so extreme that Piper Laurie couldn’t imagine this movie as anything but a dark comedy, which ironically gives her performance an over the top intensity that makes it feel enormously real.

The bullying that ensues when Carrie has her period in gym class and freaks out is horrifying and also feels enormously real as someone who spent the majority of seventh grade being bullied and here again actors Nany Allen and John Travolta (in his first movie roll) did not understand the severity of their cruelty and positions as antagonists, thinking instead that they were comic relief until seeing the film.

This is something I find very interesting about Carrie as a film, and I imagine it owes to where horror was as a genre at that time, that several actors involved didn’t really understand what they were doing and in that misunderstanding delivered the right tone.

Carrie is not a particularly scary film as I watch it now, but I find that it views fairly current. It is horrifying and feels claustrophobic, owing to the very real feeling that no matter where you go you can’t escape torment. This is what it felt like to be bullied in seventh grade as I didn’t really feel safe anywhere and any happiness felt like a rug that would be pulled at any moment.

It really shines a light on the murky permissiveness and culpability at play that allows this kind of thing to happen. Is Willaim Katt’s Tommy Ross a bad guy deserving to die by bucket to the head (or burning to death if the bucket didn’t do the job)? Does Betty Buckley’s Miss Collins deserve to burn to death after the chuckle she lets out as Carrie is covered in pig’s blood, despite having advocated and comforted Carrie earlier? Did Amy Irving’s Sue deserve to survive at the end for trying to keep Carrie from being humiliated? These are questions that help to elevate this out of the ‘bullied girl moves things with her mind’ set up that can be shoved away into schlock horror.  One thing isn’t in question, PJ Soles’s Norma is such a bitch that it almost feels cathartic when Micheal Myers strangles her with a phone cord two years later. PJ Soles rocks, though.

The religious horror that played out at home has always felt infinitely worse to me than the bullying at school. As bad as the bullying was, being locking in a closet and physically abused by someone who you can’t talk to or relate to in anyway without them turning on you and claiming that you are an affront to god and some kind of demon is so much worse and contributes in a not insignificant way to Carrie’s troubles at school. I came from a very religious home which was often difficult to navigate but thankfully I did not endure this kind of horse shit at all. But I knew some kids who were at least in striking distance of this kind of thing. The kind of zealotry that can’t be reasoned with even when talking about normal body functions is a far more stifling prison to be confined in that even the prayer closet Carrie gets locked in to pray for forgiveness. At least when the doors are closed in the closet you aren’t getting hit and actively berated, or at the very least the brerating can be better ignored with a door between the attacker and the victim. The figurine of St Sebastian, pierced with arrows, is pretty creepy and pre-sages Margaret White’s death in a fairly satisfying way. Let it be a lesson, if you are going to abuse and imprison your daughter for having the power to move things with her mind, don’t put something in the torture closet to give her ideas on how to do away with you.

DePalma’s direction here goes a long way toward making everything feel crazy and off kilter. From the suffocating mob scene in which Carrie is being pelted with tampons while she is screaming for help, to the spin at the prom, the film always feels off and keeps the audience off balance. 50 years later, the shots, editing, and effects work remain convincing and effective. It is hard to catch your breath during this film and while it doesn’t make it a laugh riot fun time at the movies, it delivers a brand of horror that doesn’t need to jump scare you to make you feel hopeless dread.

There have been a lot of attempts to remake and sequelize Carrie but none of them have even come close to what DePalma managed here. Both his direction and the powerful performances have solidified this as the definitive adaptation of this source material and is also what took Stephen King from relative obscurity to the de facto master of horror that he has been for decades. Mike Flannagan has an adaptation in mini-series form in the works and if there is anyone who can deliver a worthy remake of Carrie it is him, but however good or bad it might be, it is doubtful that it will touch this masterpiece.

Carrie is one of the two films on this year’s list that I saw when I was a kid. I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I saw it, but it was with my mom, who was a closeted horror fan. If you asked her if she liked horror, she would not cop to it, but she read Stephen King and Dean R Koontz and she watched a lot of horror movies. I saw this with her on TV, surely an edited version before we had cable. One specific scene is forever burned into my brain because it scared the living shit out of me as a kid. When Amy is going to Carrie’s grave in her dream to leave flowers and Carrie’s hand comes out and grabs her, I was ruined. I haven’t approached a grave since without the half-assed expectation of a wrist grab in the back of my mind.

My relationship with horror when I was a kid was fraught and I was very easily terrified. I slept with the lights on and with the door open until probably around 5^th grade, which looking back doesn’t make a lot of sense given that it just offers a monster or killer a clear path to you and makes it easier to see you, but movies like Carrie didn’t help. When I watch it now, I don’t find it scary at all outside of the notion that people like Carrie’s mom definitely exist, but imagery like the hand coming out of the grave or Carrie on stage covered in blood has stuck with me over the years. This is why, with other important films like Taxi Driver right there, Carrie is my favorite of 1976.

2. Rocky-John Avildsen

My introduction to the Rocky franchise was with Rocky 3 and Rocky 4, the latter of which captured my nine-year old imagination in a profound way. The silly and over the top tone became what Rocky was to me. When I eventually went back to watch the original, I found myself baffled by many things. One, where was the robot? Two, why didn’t Rocky win? Three, is that the most awkward date ever captured on film? In the years since the rug pull of goofy Rocky into a serious character study, I have come to appreciate Rocky for what it is and for what it would lead to in boxing and martial arts movies in the future. It also made me understand how Stallone could pull off an Oscar nomination for writing the screenplay. It is kind of wild how different subsequent films were from this original and it makes one wonder why there were no criminal charges brought up against Rocky V for murdering such a great film’s legacy so completely. Luckily Rocky Balboa and the Creed series have brought the character back to life.

Watching the original film now, it is difficult to see it without the context of what comes after it both in this series and other sports/fight movies. But it is moving and inspiring with exciting boxing action that does not overshadow the personal drama. It also makes me hope that I don’t talk non-stop on dates while my date is awkwardly silent. I don’t have the juice to open an ice skating rink after hours and I don’t have Stallone’s abs so I doubt I could pull Adrian. Any time I find myself monologuing on something I think to myself “I hope I am not pulling a Rocky here.” I also think this when I am getting my ass kicked in sparring sessions.

I would be lying if I said that the original Rocky is my favorite of the series as I will always have a special place in my heart for IV but it is easily the best made of the series and I think the Academy agrees there, handing it three Oscars including Best Picture. People named ‘Adrian’ may disagree but people probably don’t shout their name at them as much as they might have 50 years ago.

3. Taxi Driver-Martin Scorsese

It may feel like a slap in the face to position Taxi Driver below Rocky in the same way it was for Taxi Driver to miss Best Picture, but while Taxi Driver is amazing, it is hard not to vote for hope and perseverance over isolated psychosis.

It isn’t to say that Taxi Driver is a worse movie for how bleak it is, this is a masterpiece and it’s legacy is much less questionable than Rocky’s, John Hinkley aside, but when deciding what to watch on a given afternoon, I will more often reach for something less depressing.

None of this is meant to speak ill of Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader’s study of a damaged veteran in Travis Bickel who becomes increasingly more unstable as he drives a cab on the streets of New York. This movie is fantastic and I am not genuinely sure what I can say about this film that hasn’t been said better before many times over. I watched Taxi Driver pretty late. My parents were really weird about what they would let me watch when I was a kid. Fucked up horror movies got a pass a fair amount and wildly inappropriate comedies, but adult dramas like this? I was kept away like there was some sort of plague in there. This gave me some notable gaps, particularly in the 70’s, so when I finally did see Taxi Driver, it was after years of jokes and references in pop culture that dulled its edge for me somewhat. I loved it, it is great, but it didn’t really become one of my movies, not in the way Carrie and Rocky did. It is amazing, though and I do think it is fairly nuts that it didn’t win Best Picture.

4. Murder by Death-Robert Moore

A Neil Simon penned send up of cozy mysteries, Murder By Death offers up parodies of great literary detectives from the great mystery writers in a game to solve a murder in order to win a million dollars. This is certainly not the first or only cozy mystery parody but is one of the most notable and provided the template for others to follow. It won awards and was praised for how funny and clever the writing is and has also aged pretty badly in several ways.

The cast here is absolutely fucking nuts with the likes of Alec Guiness, David Niven, Peter Sellers, Peter Falk, Eillen Brennan, Maggie Smith, James Cromwell, James Coco, and Truman Capote. That they are playing parodies of Miss Marples, Hercule Poirot, Sam Spade, Charlie Chan, and Nick and Nora Charles makes everything much more fun as it is a who’s who of classic detectives. Sherlock Holmes and Watson were originally in the movie as well but their scenes were cut. If you are a mystery fan, this is an embarrassment of riches of a parody.

As mentioned, not everything has aged well, most notably Peter Sellers as the Charlie Chan parody. It can be argued that the parody was aiming at the fact that Charlie Chan was classically played by a non-Asian actor, but I think that caricature still reads pretty offense watching it today. Similar things could be said about the blind butler and deaf/mute cook. Ultimately, it is a product of the time it was made and I am not a fan of censoring work from the past. There is more going on here and it continues to be very funny despite some of the jokes and performances that have aged poorly. This is the other movie I saw as a kid. My mom and I rented it from the video store one lazy day at home and I loved it. My mom was very into murder mysteries in general and Agatha Christie in particular and she loved this as well. Oddly, I didn’t get into cozy mysteries in earnest until I was an adult but I adored movies like this and Clue. I doubt Clue would be what it is without this movie coming first. Rewatching this now makes me really wish that I could watch this with my mom again with my current taste and understanding of what was being parodied here. As it is, when I watch it, I feel closer to her and that is not nothing.

5. The Omen-Richard Donner

Religious horror and paranoia really ruled the roost in the 60s and 70s when it came to horror. It was not the only game in town but there was a lot of it and one of the best examples came from Richard Donner with the Omen. The story of an American Ambassador to Rome who may very well be raising the anti-Christ, the Omen is a chilling and disturbing picture that sticks with you.

Boasting a lead performance from Gregory Peck gave the Omen extra weight and legitimacy even as he makes the insane decision to replace his still born baby with one the doctor offers without telling his wife. I think even if you take all the satanism out of this, this set up is terrifying on its face. The man swaps out his dead baby for some rando baby and doesn’t tell his wife. Holy shit. An argument could be made that he deserves the anti-Christ for that bullshit.

The Omen is a movie I saw much later into my life but it still fucked me up when I watched it. Like Carrie, I don’t find it ‘scary’ so much as I find it enormously disturbing. When I was younger I didn’t watch it because religious horror messed me up more than anything else because I believed in that shit really hard. I couldn’t watch the Exorcist when I was little and even seeing the Leslie Nielson parody Repossessed gave me nightmares for weeks. So I gave the Omen a miss for a really long time. When I finally did watch it, I still found it disturbing (as opposed to the Exorcist which I thought was pretty funny the first time I actually saw it). “Look at me Damien, it’s all for you” into hanging herself outside of a building was deeply disturbing to me.

I haven’t watched the sequels aside from the prequel the First Omen but I don’t really feel like I need to. The original delivered all the jackal born ant-Christy badness that I need and that is really kind of a lot.